In order to support continuous rises in the number of communication services users, service providers are constantly increasing network capacity. These increases in network capacity have resulted in the worldwide deployment of large numbers of network devices, as well as associated communication links connecting those network devices. Although the network devices are configured during initial deployment, situations often arise in which service providers must rapidly distribute configuration changes across large numbers of network devices in large-scale networks.
Since the application of network device configuration changes often impacts customer service, and service providers are typically obligated to adhere to service level assurance agreements regarding service availability and quality, configuration changes to network devices must be completed within rigorous timeframes. For example, in an Internet Protocol (IP) network having 500 network devices (each network device having an average of 100 interfaces), configuration changes to approximately 50,000 interfaces would need to be completed within a maintenance window of just a few hours.
One current method of effecting configuration changes on network devices includes developing specialized scripts, and then executing those scripts one network device at a time. Unfortunately, this method is expensive in terms of both service provider resources and customer impacts. The service provider resources (both software development and administrative) required to design, create, and execute the scripts on a device-by-device basis are potentially enormous. This is especially true if the configuration changes must be completed within a rigorous timeframe since such a situation would require a significant number of people to monitor the status of hundreds of running jobs. The scenario is exacerbated for network device reconfiguration performed in response to security threats or network device bugs, in which a large number of configuration changes may need to be performed with minimal notice for scheduling employees to develop, execute, and monitor a multitude of scripts.
In addition to being expensive in terms of service provider resources, the reconfiguration of a large network using scripts is expensive in terms of the time required to complete the reconfiguration of a large number of network devices, and the potential impact to the customers supported by those network devices. Furthermore, this method often fails to account for implementation timing, configuration change rollbacks, error correction, and other problems often encountered during the reconfiguration of network devices. This inability of the use of such scripts to account for these conditions further exacerbates the timing issue (i.e., completing network device configuration changes within the shortest possible timeframe in order to minimize impact to the customers).
As such, a need exists in the art for a method of adjusting a distribution schedule controlling distribution of network device configuration changes associated with a plurality of network devices.